Halperin’s analysis hit the airwaves unedited: MSNBC has since confirmed that “Morning Joe” has a 7-second delay, but that a producer pushed the wrong button and the comment ran un-bleeped. Halperin soon issued an on-air apology: “I shouldn’t have said it.” He also reflected on his gaffe later in the show, calling the comment “disrespectful to the president and the office.”

Within hours of the show’s conclusion, MSNBC suspended Halperin indefinitely and issued a smack down: “Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air.”

Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney criticized Halperin’s remarks as “inappropriate,” and said that he had expressed this sentiment to MSNBC’s executives. Meanwhile, Obama’s advisor David Axelrod told the Washington Post’s The Plum Line blog that Halperin’s comments were “stupid and tasteless.”

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

In his own statement through MSNBC, Halperin, an editor-at-large for Time magazine, said he completely agreed with the network’s actions. He then took to the Web to continue his apology circuit, expressing his regret through Twitter and his Time blog, The Page.

He had to do something, I suppose. But Cory Scherer, an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University who has studied the effects of swearing on persuasion, says Halperin’s slew of apologies smacks of overkill.

“If you’re going to apologize that much then it’s going to make the incident appear more scandalous than it really was,” he says.

And maybe that’s partially the point. Time Warner said in a statement that it believed Halperin had appropriately apologized for the slur, and that he’ll keep his position. Could this little shot of controversy actually be beneficial in the long run? “[Halperin's] outspokenness may ultimately help them sell more magazines,” says Scherer.

When you pull into a McDonald’s, you have certain expectations about the meal you are buying. “McDonald’s”–a trademarked term–serves as an information shortcut for consumers. That’s an extremely valuable asset that some companies will go to surprisingly great lengths to protect.

Take Entrepreneur Media Inc., which owns the U.S. trademark for the word “entrepreneur.” Try to make hay with that term–say, by using it as part of the name of your company, a web site or newsletter–and EMI will go after you, even if you are the very sort of aspiring business builder that EMI targets with its monthly publication Entrepreneur, with a paid circulation of 600,000. (For the full story on EMI’s aggressive tactics, recently reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, go here.)

Can such a generic word as “entrepreneur” truly be trademarked? Well, yes. Trademarks are categorized on a spectrum, with distinctive or arbitrary marks such as Nike and Apple on one end, and terms that are primarily descriptive (many which cannot be trademarked) on the other.

Christopher Renk, an attorney at the intellectual property law firm Banner & Witcoff, explains that “entrepreneur” falls in the middle, leaving lots of room for people to argue over whether or not it is valid. For many companies, that’s an argument well worth winning. “Google”, “Walmart” and “Microsoft”–all trademarked names–represent a significant chunk of their owners’ overall worth.

Image via Wikipedia

“The single largest source of intangible value in a company is its trademark,” says David Haigh, founder of Brand Finance, a brand-valuation consultancy. (By “intangible” Haigh means the worth of an asset that you can’t touch–unlike, say ,a piece of equipment, a building or even a pile of cash.) “That insight is a major sea change that has come about over the last couple of years,” he adds.

Google, in the filing for its initial public offering, worried that the term “Google” could one day become synonymous with “search”–resulting in both a loss of trademark protection and reduced brand value. Google’s trademark–now the most valuable on the planet, according to Brand Finance–is worth an estimated $44 billion, or 27% of the firm’s overall value, measured by market capitalization (its stock price multiplied by the number of shares).

We asked Brand Finance to come up with the 10 most valuable trademarks. As equity analysts do when estimating the value of a stock, Brand Finance calculates a brand’s value by finding the present value of the estimated future cash flows attributable to the brand—based on what a company without a trademark would have to pay to license it through a third-party broker. (The number-crunching is rather dizzying.) In many cases, the trademark theoretically accounts for a significant chunk of its owner’s overall worth.

“Even using conservative financial measures you end up with extremely large asset numbers,” says Haigh.

During a Congressional hearing last April, U.S. senators grilled executives at investment bank Goldman Sachs over a curiously colorful comment made by one of its lieutenants regarding the unattractive nature of a sub-prime mortgage deal. In a June 2007 email, the Goldman banker called this particular deal a raunchy, six-letter expletive.

Soon after, the company quickly cleaned up its communications policy, telling its 34,000 traders, investment bankers and other employees that they would no longer be able to send e-mails containing profanity.

Swearing policies like Goldman’s are commonplace. Citigroup and JPMorganChase have similar rules, and even Forbes regulates e-mails containing profanity to a spam folder.

Your mother may approve of that policy, but when it comes to galvanizing the troops or just getting the point across, some spicy language can come in handy in the workplace. (See this slideshow of eight boldfaced leaders who cuss for effect.)

“The problem with scrutiny laws is that employees might be hesitant not just to swear but to express relevant concerns about risk and the incompetence of people they are working with,” says Dr. Robert Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford Engineering School and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.

Sutton argues that taboo words have an emotional impact that replacements cannot equal, and suggests that when public figures like Barak Obama and Donald Trump throw about an expletive (or several in Trump’s case) it only helps them to appear more relatable. “There are times when cursing adds emphasis and does not necessarily hurt your image,” he says.

A study in 2006 by Cory R. Scherer and Brad J. Sagarin, then at Northern Illinois University, backs that up. In the study 88 university students were randomly assigned to listen to one of three speeches on the topic of high tuition rates. The speeches were similar in length and substance, with one notable difference: In one speech the speaker cursed at the beginning, in another at the end, and in the third, not at all. Results: The two orators who swore scored higher in persuasion and perceived passion than the one who didn’t. Better yet, the swearing did not affect the students’ perception of the speakers’ credibility.

“Swearing is a way of communicating that you are the most important person in the room,” adds Scherer.

Image via Wikipedia

While managers might be comfortable using a handful of celebratory expletives, lower-level employees are usually wary to follow suit. Still, in some instances swearing has been shown to band coworkers together.

In a 2007 study, “Swearing at Work and Permissive Leadership Culture: When Anti-Social Becomes Social and Incivility Is Acceptable,” researchers Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins, of University of East Anglia in the U.K., found that working swearing allows employees to express their feelings, develop relationships and build solidarity. They also noted that social swearing can help to blow off steam.

“If you use swearing in a humorous way, it can be a great tool for relieving stress in a situation and bringing the group closer,” agrees Scherer.

Swearing can have even more salubrious effects. Researchers at Keele University in Staffordshire, England reported in July 2009 that cursing can reduce physical pain. In their experiment, volunteers held their hands in ice water, first while cursing and then while using less objectionable phrases. Those who cursed were able to keep their hands submerged longer, an effect that was especially strong among volunteers who said they didn’t typically curse.

Yet the aversion to vulgarity persists. Dr. Michael Goodman, director of Corporate Communication International and the Baruch College master’s program in Corporate Communication points out that the potential for profanity to be interpreted in the wrong way is too high. “Some psychologists will say that cursing is a sign of immaturity as much as it is a sign of coping,” he says.

Goodman also notes that cussing run amok can lead to contentious, and even litigious outcomes. Baruch and Jenkins refer to a case where a personal assistant whose manager had described her as being “an intolerable bitch on a Monday morning,” sued for constructive dismissal and won.

“There are positive attributes to swearing, but ultimately it is a boundary line that most managers would not want to get confused by their subordinates,” says Goodman. “The risk of being offensive and creating a hostile work environment makes it a losing situation.”

Bottom line on profanity in the workplace: Use with caution–and don’t make an ass out of yourself.

Only those with money, special skills and a lot of luck can start a successful business, right?

The fact is there are myriad enterprises waiting to be hatched that don’t require gobs of capital and fancy degrees. We’re not talking about the next Google, Microsoft or General Electric here, but tidy, profit-generating outfits all the same. Better yet, you get to bust down those cubicle walls and be your own boss.

To canvass for ideas, we teamed up with Adams Business (a unit of F+W Media), publisher of The Start Your Own Business Bible, released this month. The book contains 501 “new ventures you can launch today,” each with its own breakdown—including the startup funding required (as little as $500 in some cases), an overview of the product or service, the typical fee structure, initial equipment needed, hidden costs, operational tips and more—to give budding entrepreneurs an idea of what they’re getting into. (Author Richard Walsh was unavailable for comment.)

Here are 20 of the more compelling, easy-to-start businesses, spanning a range of industries, customer segments and initial funding needs. Some are quirkier than others, and all are within reach for those with a healthy supply of common sense and determination. And, yes, luck always helps.

Description: With the unemployment rate at 9.1%, you’ll find a wide market of people clamoring for a leg up. Give it to them by organizing a series of small after-work mixers at a local hotel and advertise them on a regular basis. Supply a few light refreshments and a speaker, and then let people mingle.

Fees: admission fee. Offer discounts to those who leave their business cards so you can build a mailing list.

Tools of the Trade: Phone, computer, database software.

Tip: Works well in a metropolitan area where you can hold multiple mixers a month in different locations.

Hoffman helped build Priceline.com, the name-your-own-price travel site, part of tech holding company Walker Digital, and later headed up other Walker business units, including Priceline YardSale, which applied the auction model to selling everything from toys to refrigerators. When the dotcom bubble burst, Priceline’s shares cratered from $22 billion to $226 million in a matter of months. All units except for the flagship site were shuttered. “In one sense you are losing millions of dollars, but it was millions of dollars on paper that came as fast as it went,” says Hoffman, who was fortunate enough to cash in some of his founders’ shares in Priceline.com before disaster struck.

After various managerial stints, Hoffman, now 50, decided to share his lessons learned with the next generation of startups. In 2009 he launched ColorJar, a venture “accelerator” with eight web developers and strategists who help entrepreneurs bring new ecommerce concepts to life in exchange for slices of equity. The company also provides marketing and strategy consulting for more mature companies looking to expand online. ColorJar, with offices in Chicago and New York, has worked with 35 companies thus far, some of which have already raised fresh capital. Says Hoffman: “I’ve had a number of mentors in my career and the ability to pay that forward is very important.”

Hoffman knows that having a slick Web site and an effective marketing strategy isn’t enough. Success depends on being able to take a few punches and not go down. His three-pronged advice:

Define Success Up Front

You have to define what success looks like at the outset so that you’ll be able to recognize failure before it’s too late. I always ask entrepreneurs: “If we are doing well three months from now, what will that look like?” The answer should be as quantitative as possible, along the lines of: “We will have 100 new customers,” or “We will have doubled our revenue.”

What often happens is a year after launch you have a meeting with the investors and founders, and the entrepreneur says we are doing way better than I thought we would, while the investor says we did not do anything like I expected. By defining a rolling set of milestones, everyone can say, “If we hit these specific benchmarks we are doing well, if we double them we are doing great and if we only get half of them we are way off target.”

Adjust Midstream

The best teams make half-time adjustments–which is why you can’t rely on your gut. You can only adjust your course in midstream if you have enough data to work with. That means having measurement systems set up before you start in order to find out what is going wrong and to make the right changes.

Example: You might fear spending a lot on marketing to acquire customers. Track the data, though, and you might find that customer-acquisition costs fall over time by spending a bit more up front to establish your brand. If you’re not tracking data to analyze the cost of acquiring each new customer, you won’t be able to make that adjustment.

Conduct a Post-Mortem

Failure teaches you to be analytical. When I fail, I immediately sit down and do a post-mortem. I make a list to figure out all of the things I did wrong. By looking at that chart the next time around, I can immediately sense when things are going wrong because I have learned how to analyze those failure points.

My first startup was a travel software company called Competitive Technologies Inc. Sun Microsystems was a customer for some of our products and one day we got a call from them saying that they were going to terminate our relationship. I immediately pulled the whole team together to do a post-mortem. After charting out our expectations and the customer’s, we learned that we had made some wrong assumptions at the start. Sun eventually agreed to restructure their contract with us and now I always ask clients to write down their expectations on day one, instead of waiting for a one-year review.